This chapter (Boyd Davis principal author, project director) discusses issues arising from the development of a world-first location-aware game (’Ere be Dragons) using live bio-sensing, funded by the Wellcome Trust and supported by Hewlett Packard Research, who created the entirely new combinations of technology used for the project. The chapter contributes to the understanding of ‘serious games’, a field traceable to George Mallen’s 1968 Eco Game but increasingly significant in the past decade. The project used imagery and animation to represent combined data gathered from two live streams, location and heart-rate, exploring the new possibilities of media that are pervasive, multimodal and physical. It previously received international attention and awards reported in RAE2008; the new contribution here was to identify the relevance for medical information technology. This invited chapter was the only one in the book not written by medical experts.
The research programme required a cross-disciplinary team of artists, interaction experts and health scientists, using art to explore bioscience in the context of public health; the science collaborator was Professor Riddoch, Senior Scientific Editor, Chief Medical Officer's report, Physical Activity and Health (2004). It combined novel mobile technologies with novel gameplay, unlike most digital games, which are reactionary and unimaginative in their models of play. Finally, formal and informal evaluation was undertaken with users.
The chapter focuses on the use of digital gameplay as a means of modifying attitudes and behaviours, and the benefits of live feedback during use as distinct from retrospective review of performance. Two contexts are described: the crisis in health caused by widespread low levels of physical activity and the techno-cultural context in which the work was developed. Few projects have been based on live heart-rate, and the chapter explains the problems and the potential of exploiting this aspect of behaviour in digital play.